Writer-insighter – Page 28 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Reading with the enemy

Longer ago than I want to admit knowing about Magazine had a song called Feed The Enemy.

Yes you do know. Almost certainly, if you’re in any way seriously into music, otherwise you’re in the same camp as someone saying they don’t know anything about Mozart because he did his stuff before they were born. And this on a rainy summer day when it’s far too wet to go for a walk and it’s Sunday too and even though there’s no school tomorrow and hasn’t been for several decades, only Kate Bush’s early songs can do justice to the mood of just-deferred despair that’s always been England, in my experience. I don’t mean the manic roaring in the ears of the Hounds of Love, but more the determined languid resignation of The Kick Inside. Anywaaaaaay, as girls called Emma used to say, curled up half-kneeling on the carpet in front of the fire in their Dad’s living room in the half dark of just the same kind of Sunday afternoons.

Anyway. Feed the Enemy was written when just for a change the official story of Stuff That Just Is was just as split-personality as it is now. The Soviets are a threat. All the time. They want to destroy our way of life. So we’d better sell them cheap butter and wine that’s cheap because we make too much of it so the EC buys it and flogs it off to the USSR and complains about them invading Afghanistan at the same time. When university politics lecturers said things like ‘the USSR has to expand somewhere…’ (yes I’m looking at you, Southampton University Class of Oh Is That The Time Already?) It doesn’t really matter when it was. The names change but it’s always the same story. We give people guns or look the other way when our friends do then run about screaming that they’re trying to destroy our way of life.

Anywaaaaaaay, all of which, imaginary Emma from long ago, is a way of saying I had a bit of a First World Problem this week. Do you feed the enemy or not? I wanted a book. It was a biography of Rommel and the first page grabbed me because of the way it was written. It wasn’t the usual MilHist: “at 18:24 the XIVDivision advanced towards Mersa Matruh unchecked with only light casualties” describing families’s hopes and dreams like their menfolk rent limb from limb and burned alive. It was actually readable, about the man behind the legend.

So far so what?

Rude, but a fair point. I didn’t always read this stuff. I feel I need to now, possibly because I didn’t, possibly because for my generation the War as The Big Secret that adults didn’t talk about in any detail, it being distinctly bad form if they did and also as I know now, because it was much, much too soon away to start talking about it. And for other reasons involving people I know and people I’ve met and talked to.

The big FWP was simple. I wanted to buy the book. But it was written by David Irving. Mr Holocaust Denier. I wasn’t there. I’ve seen the photos and everyone else has as well, the same as I’ve seen photos of unicorns. In Photoshop world a photo on your laptop screen doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. I read about the American massacre of guards at Auschwitz who got themselves machine-gunned after they surrendered because the liberating Americans found a train full of machine-gunned Jews there. The fact that American aircraft had shot it up not knowing and not able to know what or who was inside wasn’t known and was surprisingly not well-advertised until much later. I don’t know if, as Irving maintained, there was or wasn’t arsenic in the plaster of the walls at the camp. But I’ve met people who saw piles of bodies at the camps with their own eyes.

I don’t understand why if there were extermination camps rather than say, camps where no-one particularly cared if the inmates died or not, why anyone at all survived there. But whether those people died of gas or bullets or typhoid doesn’t really matter, it seems to me. It also seems insane to say that what thousands of people saw for themselves just didn’t happen.

Hence the dillemma. The book was second-hand, after all, so it’s not as if Mr Irving was going to get my money for his stuff, and it was written a decade before he seems to have finally gone nuts and started saying things people I’ve spoken to saw for themselves just didn’t happen. But still. Do you buy the book? Do you have anything to do with people whose ideas are mind-numbingly offensive, however remote? Do you feed the enemy or not?

It’s always raining over the border
There’s been a plane crash out there
In the wheat fields
They’re picking up the pieces
We could go and look and stare

How many friends have we over there?
The border guards fight unconvincingly
Whatever we do it seems things are arranged
We always have to feed the enemy.

Magazine (Tomlinson/Devoto/Sony – Feed The Enemy).

The old man who told me about the time he saw the piles of bodies for himself, along with the rest of his squadron when they occupied a German airfield also told me how his unit marched the inhabitants of the nearest German town through the camp so nobody could say “I didn’t know.” He also told me how that evening there was a serious discussion about how maybe it would be a good idea to just break open the armoury and go back into town and shoot everyone they saw.

It could be me, obviously

Oliver Sachs.

Yes I know. He’s brilliant, isn’t he. Superb. So, so I don’t know, perceptive. I bet he’s got a voice like that on the radio too. And those books that everyone’s read, like the Man Who Did Something With A Hat or something. You’ve read it. You say you have, anyway. And the way he states the entirely obvious all the time and gives the impression this is supremely remarkable. Brilliant. Isn’t it?

The Man Who Ought To Have Stroked A Cat

He goes for a walk in Norway and there’s a bull in a field. There’d been a sign saying watch out, there’s a bull in the field but he’d ignored it. Was it in Norwegian? Why did he think it was, as he said, just a Norwegian farmer’s sense of humour? Really because the field was up a hill? Sorry, this guy’s supposed to be really intelligent, isn’t he? The same way he was when he strapped 18 months of research notes to his motorcycle seat with a bungee, rather than say, putting them in a bag so they wouldn’t fall off and blow all over the road and get lost forever.

He looks at the bull and because it’s huge and probably going to kill him he focusses on its nose. He falls down the hill and breaks his leg and thinks he’s going to freeze to death and it’s the most amazing sensation when he’s rescued and doesn’t die after all. Stunning. He has his leg in plaster for months and then has problems walking. Wow. Such insight. He loses vision in his eye and guess what? He can’t see out of it and bumps into things. And he can’t imagine what’s in the field of vision he hasn’t got, because he can’t see it.

“I documented all this in minute detail.”

Oliver, I know. So far so blah. Those pages aren’t going to fill themselves, after all.

Oh and he gets his entire existence vilified by his mother but hey, it’s just her upbringing, no biggie.

Hold on. Just back up a moment there. He says he thinks girls are alright, has a chat with his dad and says he thinks boys are a bit more so but he’s never done anything about it and best not tell mum and next morning his mother calls him an abomination and somehow none of this needs looking at in any detail whatsoever. Not the total betrayal of trust, the name-calling, the auto-hatred she’s able to switch on. Nope. That’s how she was brought up. Really. Janet And John must have had a special chapter that covered telling your doll that you wish she’d never been born if she says she likes people and haven’t done anything about it. Naturally.

I’ve never liked his writing. It isn’t fresh or as much fun for me as it is for him. I don’t get it, at all. But most of all I don’t understand why stating the obvious in a comprehensive study of self-absorption is supposed to be so enthralling.

The power of drivel

I was reading something on a Linkedin forum. I know, ok? I’ve never really seen the point of it. You can ‘connect’ with people, but you can on Facebook and see what they had for dinner and what their cat looks like too. I think Linkedin would say it’s ‘more professional,’ because you can post your CV up and well, join in discussions. Maybe without getting in fights with total strangers the Facebook way. Although reading this morning, my first reaction was to start TYPING IN CAPITALS to show how annoyed I was. And that was when I was agreeing with someone.

It was only a thing about avoiding jargon. Harmless enough, yes? Well no, actually. Not harmless at all.

Very often, the evaluator is a young, relatively inexperienced person who has come of age in a fast -paced, digital world highly dependent upon graphics, very light on lengthy paragraphs, living in the present, unversed in the subtle distinctions of grammar.

By deduction then, we should perhaps become less inclined to favor a narrative approach to our proposals, in favor of a graphical one.

Ignore the thing about living in the present, because only a few remaining people who remember Jethro Tull are actually living in the past. Just ignore it. What we’re saying here is that somebody who needs cartoons to understand something has been given the job of evaluating million-pound proposals. Say, to build a motorway, or get the bins emptied outside every house in a city every Tuesday morning (tender must include option dates for Christmas collections). How do we deal with that?

Cut and paste little bags of money in the costs section? Maybe it’s the way forward. I’m assuming we’re not going to look at the option of actually hiring anyone who can read and write properly, because that might be a bit threatening and disrupt the office dynamic. I think I’ve got that right.

The blood pressure really became an issue when I clicked on the next article. It was about integrating marketing information with business strategy and whether it was a good idea. You do know. Whether what the business should do next should be based on facts or what the chairman’s wife thought she heard at the hairdresser’s. The use of the words business and strategy in that order alone should have told me not to read it. This definitely did:

“A nice process description. I would add the need for the strategist to interwork with people in the internal team as well as the customers. By communicating the strategy internally you gain buy-in, acceptance and alignment of the organisation with the strategic goals so that all employees that contact the customer are on the same message.”

I’m quite good at work but I don’t know what interwork is. Apart from pompous, redundant drivel.

And no, I can’t think of a cartoon graphic that would illustrate the concept, apart from an enormous ass. As for gaining acceptance and alignment – let me see. Does that mean you tell people what the company’s going to do in an attempt to get them to accept it and so that staff don’t totally piss-off the customers by telling them rubbish? It’s an idea, certainly.

So why not say so?

The waiting

It’s the longest day today and up here in Scotland where I am right now, holed-up on the run in a small hotel in Tomintoul, that means the days are very, very long.

Because it’s Scotland it’s raining and it’s cold. I had to buy a sweater yesterday. I’d packed a spare but when I put it on it looked as if dogs had slept on it. Then I remembered that’s exactly what had happened back in January. That was a nice time. A hopeful time, cold but the days getting longer, one by one till now.

Near Christmas you hear Peter Gabriel’s song about ring out Solstice bells. Nobody knows what it means. It’s just another word, the way words are supposed to mean anything anyone wants them to mean now. It’s another solstice today. I don’t hear any bells ringing at all.

The place I was passing had a sale on, so I got a really nice jumper for £20. But it’s not the same as the old one. That was Italian, from Peek & Klopenburg in Dam Square, and even though it was in a sale it was a bit more than £20. It paid for itself though; I bought it back in 2002. Or 2003. I can’t really remember. I was in Amsterdam quite a bit for a while, for reasons which need not be examined too closely but were legal if not perhaps entirely moral. It depends, I think. Possibly.

Anyway.

Anyway, after today we’ll all be able to say it once again, showing our true British pessimism. Altogether now at 7pm tomorrow night please, roll your eyes skyward and say ruefully:

“Aye, the nights are fair drawing in noo.”

How the West was won.

1024px-Jesse-james-farm — The little homestead Jesse James came from. It wasn’t enough for his father.

A long time ago I had a friend from Kentucky. His great grandpa had seen Jesse James ride past. It was a family ritual he was lucky enough to be just born long enough ago for this very old man to do his party piece, the same way he’d told the story to his own son, and to his grandchildren and probably anybody else who would listen, the way men do.

The little boy was lead into the old man’s presence the same way other little boys had been for the past fifty years.

“Listen, great gran’pa’s gonna tell you ’bout the time he saw Jesse James…”

Like a lot of American heroes or maybe heroes anywhere, Jesse James had what might be called interpersonal relationship issues.

A man with surprising relationship issues. — A man with a limited anger management skillset.

He was born in 1847 in Missouri and got pulled into the Civil War as a teenager. It wasn’t like the song. It wasn’t big battles and flags and sad bugles, but a gang of people who went after another gang of people, preferably on their own, or at least hopefully vastly outnumbered and taken by surprise. James was fifteen when that started. After the war he took the skills he had, which were mostly killing people, and used them to rob banks and trains. Eventually one of his gang members called Robert Ford did the sensible thing and blew a hole the size of a tea-cup through him while he was hanging a picture in a house he’d rented.

There were popular stories which had the James gang as latter-day Robin Hoods, but the people they robbed didn’t think so. The ones who survived, anyway. It was a time when there weren’t police, interstates, paved roads in Missouri, cars, indoor lavatories or pretty much anything else we have now.

So the little boy, like generations of little boys before him stood in awe at the old man’s knee while older men, his brothers and uncles who’d all heard the story at the same knee stood there and smirked, waiting to hear it again.

“Did I ever tell you ’bout the time I saw Jesse James? I was about as big as you are now when he rode past me on his horse, about as close as you’re standing. I could’ve reached out and touched him.”

And the little boy’s eyes went wide and the older boys and men nudged each other and winked and waited as the little boy said, the same way they’d said for half a century and more, “So what did you do, g’paw?”

And the old man paused and maybe looked around the rest of his audience, judging the pause even though it was a true story, before he thought the time was right to tell the little boy about outlaws and the people who weren’t before he said quietly:

“I hid in the ditch.”

Heavy relics

A joke. A pathetic one. There ought to be another control pot, labelled “Fakeness.” It should go all the way to 12.

I saw one of these in a shop window about ten years ago. I thought it was a joke then. I still do now, except this is a joke for people with two grand to spray up the wall.

Are the soles curling off of your blue suede shoes? Do your flabby arms chaffe when you windmill your guitar? Is your quiff, let’s face it, not quite as stiff as it used to be?
Ladies and elderly gentlemen, you need a Fender Relic.

Here are some words. I know all of them, just not in this order.

Fender USA Custom Shop 60’s HSS Strat guitar heavy relic Daphne Blue

As the ad says, 100% genuine and all original, but obviously it means 100% genuine fake. A ’60s guitar is what it says in one sentence, but a 2012 guitar not even 20 words on.

“Let’s talk about the finish first…” Oh do let’s, as they say in Enid Blyton books, which are more realistic than anything about this guitar or the company selling it now.

Relic® – There and back and still here today.The authentic worn-in wear of a guitar that has experienced many years of regular use in clubs and bars. Marks that tell a story, finish checking all over the body, and scars, dings and dents from bridge to headstock.

Can we have a look at that? Or doesn’t the Sale of Goods Act apply any more? It isn’t authentic because it’s fake. It isn’t worn in wear, because it’s fake. It hasn’t experienced many years of anything, because it’s three years old. It certainly hasn’t been played in clubs and bars regularly, if at all. The marks it has tell a story, certainly. A story of fake. It’s fake. Everything about it is fake. A fake story about a desperate company selling fake guitars to desperate fake posers. Jeez, I thought I was bad enough. Even I wouldn’t buy one of these. Not even women who’ve had screaming fits at me would accuse me of that.

This model that I have for sale here is a ‘Heavy Relic’ – a custom order Relic with just a little more ‘World Tour’ treatment !!

Many people think why would you buy a guitar that has been artificially aged ? The answer is very simple – the LOOK !.. and the feel. This guitar plays like new (because it is) rather than an old worn out Strat with a part-warped neck.

“How’s about that then,guys’n’gals?”

Why bother buying a Mexican Strat and a packet of sandpaper and still having change out of £400? I mean, that just wouldn’t be authentic, would it? It’s the look, after all. That’s got to cost £1600 on its own. Sandpaper isn’t cheap you know. Except actually, in real life, it is.

Relic®. When bullshit isn’t enough anymore.™

A learning experience

For the past four weeks I’ve been learning how to teach English as a foreign language in London, where despite UKIP’s opinion, it isn’t even vaguely. But London was foreign to me and I used to live there.

I lived there once for six months when I left university and it was crap. You could still smoke on the Tube in those days and people did. Entering a Tube carriage on a damp, dark November evening with your shoes soaked through to inhale 20 stranger’s Picadilly smoke was a budget version of Hell. A car I was trying to repair in the street fell of the jacks I had put it on and nearly fell on top of me. I helped save someone’s life when they walked straight off a station platform and fell onto the tracks one boiling afternoon when three trains had been cancelled trapping hundreds of us all trying to go home. It’s a lot further down to the tracks at a railway station than you think it is. Or rather it’s a much longer way back up, especially when you’ve got someone’s legs end and you’re trying to heave her back up to the platform while someone else you don’t know does the shoulders end, hopefully before the train gets there. Obviously as I’m writing this, we did. The other person was wearing a suit; I was wearing a leather jacket. He got thanked by the crowd. I got ignored.

I had a crappy flat off Westbourne Grove where one night a woman I’d never seen before knocked on the door and asked me to take her to hospital. She said she’d been in an accident. I’d just been to the launderette, so I was free. I called an ambulance because she was talking in a strange way. Within 20 minutes of meeting her I was seeing the X-Rays of her fillings and the size of her brain; they assumed I was something to do with her. I sort-of was a bit, after that. For a week or so, the way things went then.

I left, then I came back again, then twenty years ago I left for good. And I don’t recognise huge chunks of the London that was there then.

Small pleasures

It was sunny this morning. I’d almost got enough sleep. I put the new flashing pedals on my really nice bike, the ones I got on Ebay for £9 instead of the £35 they ought to cost, and rode it down to the paper-shop, four miles away through the empty lanes. Then up the back road past the Old Vicarage (no, not that Old Vicarage, the one in my head, the one in Not Your Heart Away, that would be altogether too perfect, even for today), along a lane past the big weekend houses with huge name plates on their doors, probably so the once every month in the summer and probably at Christmas this year dependings (yes of course with a hyphen) can recognise their own house when they go there. And then into a place I’d never been before that somebody told me about yesterday, an ancient little wood full of bluebells and wild garlic, a perfect place I would once have loved to walk dogs in with someone gone, where the centuries sleep deep.

And from there to the boot sale where I managed to buy a huge old terracotta wine cooler and some geraniums to put in it, and on to the well, let’s call it an objet trouve market at Snape Maltings, where because nobody else wanted it I bought the shirt I saw there this time last year for £7 because it had the wrong label on it I’m pretty sure, where I had a chat with a nice woman about lamps made of old film projectors, then on up the back lane to home just as the rain was starting and managed to get the washing in before it got soaked.

"Yes, that's mine. Are you sure you wouldn't mind driving?" — *“Yes, that’s mine. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind driving? I’d be really grateful…”*

Then asparagus and scrambled eggs for lunch and polenta made for dinner which will be that and partridge breasts and inevitably at this time of year, more asparagus, bought for £6 as ‘Kitchen Grade” for about 2 kilos in a big plastic bag so it’s not straight but tastes brilliant from a huge barn on a deserted farm I’m not telling you where. But near here.

The asparagus soup is ready for the freezer, and the tea is in a mug next to me, and I know what I’m doing with this training course now after the best and worst week doing it. I spent half an hour telling myself I was packing it up on Wednesday night. Then I spent rather longer telling myself to stop being so stupid and get on with it. Result: best marks on the course so far.

Small things

But nice things. And things to be grateful for. Plus I bought a really good Gunter Grass I haven’t read yesterday, for my coat pocket for the week, still thinking that one day I will go into the perfect place that doesn’t exist and someone beautiful and kind and totally not deranged or with someone will finally say ‘all my life I’ve been waiting to meet the other person who likes that book. My car’s outside. Would you mind driving, because I have this not-at-all serious thing that affects beautiful and sensitive people who can’t be arsed to drive right at the moment. And anyway, you’ll enjoy driving it. In fact, you could drive me to my place in the Cotswolds if you like. Were you doing anything for the weekend?‘

Stranger stuff than that has happened in my life before. Much stranger. And until it does I’ve still got a cup of tea and stuff to do that I can do. And Ali Smith’s The Accidental to read as well, which is making me smile. A lot. This is a nice weekend.

The liberal consensus

I don’t know what the Liberal Party is about. I avoided running over Paddy Ashdown this week who seemed pleasantly surprised that a bicycle was stopping to let him cross on a crossing, and he seemed a straightforward-enough sort of person. Given the deranged style of riding of most cyclists I’ve encountered this week I’m not hugely surprised, the same way I’m not now when I hear about cyclists in London being killed, but that’s another story. Keep going through red lights, treat one-way streets as advisory, overtake up the inside and generally act like an arse might work in a car but sooner or later when you haven’t got a tonne of steel around you, you’re going to say ‘ouch’ just once. And not for very long before your brain gets squashed between your teeth.

Be that as it may, the liberal consensus was what people used to call pretty much anything they sort-of liked a bit. The liberal consensus is that not stealing stuff is a good thing. Not killing people. Not beating someone around the head because they contradicted you. Not going to work, not being paid for it and being sold to someone else without any say in where you live, what you’re paid or who you’re going to work for. The liberal consensus then was that the Human Rights Act, the thing the Tory government want banned in the UK, was alright. Obviously, it’s got to go. The campaign against it in The Sun will start within days.

A Good Thing.

human rights

These are the fundamentals of this evil, dangerous, subversive and ought-to-be-illegal thing. Let’s have a good look at how wicked it is. Starting at the start, obviously nobody should be allowed to live without the government’s say-so. That’s what a right to life means. Without the express approval of the government, you don’t have a right to be born or to carry on living without their approval.

As for torture, ha ha ha!!! Of course you shouldn’t have a right not to be tortured whenever the government feels like it! I mean, look at all those people in Guantanamo who were kidnapped, taken half-way around the world, tortured and gave us all that Grade A intel. Oh. Well ok, bad example, because they didn’t have any secrets to tell anyone and if someone says they’re going to kill you unless you start talking then you just start making stuff up. You see? The government said they were all liars anyway! OK, so over 90% of them hadn’t done anything against the law anywhere. But bad example or not, you obviously don’t have a right to walk down the street looking the way you do without the right to have a bag stuffed over your head, get bundled into a van and held down while someone pours water up your nose. Who the hell do you think you are?

Poundland is going to have to start paying people if you have a right to be free from forced labour, so that’s out of the window. You don’t need a right to liberty, because the government obviously wouldn’t lock you up without a good reason or at least one that suited them. Just the same way that the police wouldn’t have arrested you if you hadn’t done it, would they? Stands to reason, do you see? They’re very busy you know. They haven’t got time to make things up.

It's only funny on TV. — It’s only funny on TV.

As for Article seven, the right not to be punished for something which wasn’t against the law, that kind of hippy nonsense would stop decent, hardworking people like Ian Duncan Smith from retrospectively changing legislation.

You do not need a right to the government not being able to root through your Facebook account or your mobile phone records or your bank statements whenever they feel like seeing if you really do know that person or not and how often. Whoever they are, with or without the egg whisk.

You certainly do not need to able to think whatever you like, or decide whatever you think is best. There’s no limit to some people’s effrontery, is there? All this “I can think as I please” nonsense. You’ll think as you’re damned well told, and like it. That’s what the British media is for now.

I remember all that silly nonsense we used to have where people used to talk the most absurd nonsense. Some of them even had different opinions to the ones the government gave them. ISIS is good. David Cameron wants us to fight with them against the government of Syria. ISIS is bad. David Cameron has sent the RAF to blow up one of their jeeps. Which seems quite an expensive way of getting rid of a Toyota LandCruiser, but you have no right to that opinion, there are no contradictions here, Eastasia has always been at war with Eurasia and apart from Who’s That Girl nobody can remember anything they did anyway.

The right to freedom of assembly. No. Sorry. You may well have booked the Village Hall and paid the deposit, but you’re not coming in here talking about whatever you want without it being checked first. A what? An evening of people training their dogs? To do what exactly? No. They could be terrorists. The US Navy trained dolphins to carry bombs you know. I can see the connection even if you pretend you can’t. No, no and no.

Nobody needs the right to marry whoever they chose. If your uncle can’t find a decent person for you to marry then I’m sure the government can do it. Someone blond and Aryan and quiet, maybe.

The right not to be discriminated against? Don’t be disgusting. I’m trying to explain this sensibly, but if you’re just going to take this tone then I won’t bother. In a minute you’re going to say that people have a right for the government not to come along and take their things any time it suits them, aren’t you? Well?

You see, if you’d paid for an education to a school outside the evil clutches of the NUT then you might have a right to be educated. As it is, I’m sorry, but I can’t see any reason to believe that you’re entitled to send young, impressionable children, children for heaven’s sake, to be indoctrinated with the beleif that it’s perfectly normal for adults to wear beards and glasses, have leather patches on their sports jackets and say things like “Yes, there was homework – quiet!” or “it’s your own time you’re wasting.” You have no right to this at all.

I like a laugh as much as the next person and it always makes me chuckle when people talk about a right to a free election. It’s not as if ballot papers ever go missing, or the printing somehow forgets some of the main parties or the barcode isn’t on the back of the ballot papers so they’re invalid. Then that wretched Naomi Wolf woman starts banging on and what the Daily Mail is even thinking of repeating this nonsense I don’t know. If you do still have free elections it’s no thanks to Rupert Murdoch, who can tell you who to vote for if you still need to be told. Perhaps we’d better check your phone calls to find out.

As for the abolition of the death penalty, everyone knows they jolly well don’t do it again! Including the people who didn’t do anything in the first place.

Look. I’m trying to be reasonable about this. If you pay for a decent lawyer like a normal person none of this is going to be a problem for you, is it? Until then you can just shut up and do as you’re told. It’s not as if the government would ask you to do anything that wasn’t the right thing, is it?

English & the Glitter Band

Once upon a time in a world long ago, everybody loved Gary Glitter. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Parents hated him, but they didn’t know they had a good reason to and not the one they thought. He was everything you wanted in a rockNroll star. He had ludicrous shoes. He was dressed all in glitter. Geddit? He had shoulder pads that made the girls in Abba and Dynasty look as if they weren’t even trying. He had stupid hair and bulging eyes that made him look either hyperthyroid, perpetually amazed or very possibly both. And his lyrics and tunes were simple to the brink of moronic. What more could you ask for in a budget version of Meatloaf? We had simple tastes back then.

Paul Francis Gadd as he answered to in court was once a dustman, drank a bottle of vodka before he got out of bed, and did the warm-up stuff to get the audience going on Ready Steady Go. I just know, ok? I didn’t see it. More importantly, he fronted the Glitter Band.

They were literally unreal. A big tenor sax blast, a really simple drum-heavy beat and guitar-work that wouldn’t challenge – well, I was going to say somebody with two fingers, but given that includes Django Reinhardt it hardly counts. We used to call it RockNRoll whichever part it was, as the man himself did, but it was a made-up RockNRoll, more Cozy Powell drum-fest than anything Bill Haley ever dreamed up.

It didn’t matter. If you were down the Friday Club school disco with a bottle of cider and some aspirins, standing in your high-waist bags and platform soles, freezing in your sweat-soaked clothes outside in the dewy field, the collar of your v-neck t-shirt layered over the collar of your v-neck jumper layered over the collar of your tartanesque sports jacket, trying to get one last snog in before whoever it was’s Dad floodlit the pair of you with his Volvo headlights outside the cricket pavilion you’d know exactly who Gary Glitter was. If you want to pretend you don’t, Craig Brown described him as like ‘an oven-ready Terry Scott.’ And you do know, anyway.

Got it now? Good. He was the leader. He was the leader. He was the leader of the gang.

Yes, ok. Alright. I know he’s a paedophile. Everyone knows that now. But we didn’t know it then. And he was great.

That said, when I was reading an English grammar text today that declined the verb ‘to love’ two thoughts came to me.

The first, in what is clearly pre-senile infantilism, obsessive memory or just plain silly was to continue the declension “I love, you love” with the inevitable “my only true love,” as Mr Gadd taught us all, somewhat more memorably than anything the crew of ex-Spanish Civil War International Brigade recruits who were dragged out of retirement to teach me Latin ever managed. The second was more prudently: ‘Don’t. Just utterly don’t. Ever.’

Don’t sing it. Don’t play it. Certainly don’t mime it. Not even at a Christmas party. Even twenty years ago Blur said modern life is rubbish. (Did that hurt, Xers? Sorry. A bit) It’s certainly a lot duller than it used to be, sometimes.